For a change not writing a review of this series months (years) after reading it...
The Mirror House located in the outskirts of Kamakura belongs to Kurozawa Matsutarou, a wealthy man who has many mistresses. The manor was once the home of the twins Kirika and Sumika and their mother, who was Matsutarou's mistress, but after her death, the house was extended with an identical annex, like a mirror and no less than 48 mirrors of varying sizes were installed in both buildings, giving the building its name. When the twins were still young however, Kirika wanted to end her own life and since then, Sumika has learned to live without her sister, especially as Matsutarou kept telling her to forget about Kirika and live her own life. Matsutarou is not a loving father by any means however, and his interest in his daughters is purely political. While he lets his daughters live with their mothers while young, he has them all moved to the Mirror House when they reach a certain age, as he wishes to marry them off in political marriages, and their stay in the Mirror House is merely temporary until Matsutarou has found the perfect partner for them, regardless of their own life wishes. This has already led to tragedy one time, as last year, one of his daughters chose death rather than being forced such a life. At the moment, Sumika is joined by four of her half-sisters: Mahiru, Kurara, Sachiko and Ruri, as well as five servants. One of them is Shizuka, the half-Russian Mary Poppins-esque personal maid to Sumika who occasionally has a foul (Russian) mouth. Matsutarou only visits his daughters once a year to check up on them and to announce their upcoming marriages, but this year, his visit coincides with a heavy storm, which means three of the usual servants are stuck in town, leaving only Matsutarou, his daughters and two servants in the house. At dinner however, lightning strikes, illuminating one of the mirrors he has given to each of his daughters, and invisible lettering written on one of the mirrors is reflected on the wall, saying "Death". This angers Matsutarou and he retreats for the night, but that night, he is found murdered in one of the mirror rooms, being stabbed in the back, but for some reason he was lying on the floor with his feet towards a mirror and his arms thrown in front of him, almost as if he was trying to flee from a murderer inside the mirror.... With no means to notify the police, can the people in the manor be truly certain no more murders will occur in Tsukihara Wataru's Kagamiyakata no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Mirror House" 2020)?
Spoilers: more people die.
Kagamiyakata no Satsujin is the fourth entry in this series starring the pro-active maid Shizuka who each time works at a different place as a personal maid for young girls. The books sometimes namedrop the places/families she worked for earlier, but the books can all be read indepedently and in any order. They are all fairly formulaistic too: each book is set in the Meiji period, and set inside an isolated house with serial murders happening, and Shizuka's always there to eventually solve the case, but what makes this series memorable, despite some hick-ups, is how Shizuka is used: each time she's confronted with a killer, she not only detects, but tries to find ways to proactively stop the killer by interfering with their patterns and that leads to interesting twist on familiar tropes in mystery, for example when in an earlier novel, Shizuka notices the murders are modelled after a set of paintings, so she proposes to just destroy all the paintings to upset the killer's plans. It's these interactions with mystery tropes that make these books fun to read.
In theory, this book has interesting elements: there's a house with two mirrored sections, there are 48 different mirrors spread across the house, the first victim is seemingly killed by his own mirror image in a mirror and threatening messages are written on mirrors to announce the coming deaths. A lot of it is tropey, but that is the whole focus of this series so it never feels too reliant on tropes. However, of the four novels I have read until now, I do think this entry was by far the weakest.
The main trope of this book is the "murder announcement": the killer writes messages alluding to deaths on mirrors before committing the murders and sure, that's a trope, but... Shizuka doesn't really manage to do something really original with this, she doesn't come up with some outrageous plan to turn this "habit" around and have it backfire on the killer, or propose anything unexpected to counter this. Because of this lack of interplay with the trope at hand, Shizuka feels far more passive than in the other books. Because these books tend to be very short and rather light, Shizuka's actions usually felt as one of the major parts of the mystery, and having this aspect of the tale weakened hurts the overall experience a lot. "Announcing a murder" is just less exciting than a murderer who decapitates people, or tropes like locked rooms or mitate... While a large part of the story does ultimately revolve around the question why the murderer would chose to utilize this device of announcing their murders, the answer arrived it isn't that exciting, and gives us a rather mundane explanation you might have seen mentioned in other novels that don't even explicitly try to play with tropes.
This pattern also carries over to the whole theme of mirrors in this book. Like, cool, we have a building that is mirrored with an annex, and they feature over 40 mirrors installed here and there... but we never get a floorplan of the building, so the whole concept feels criminally underdeveloped! I wanted to see cool clever things with mirrors which become clear once you start drawing lines in the floorplans, not just vague descriptions of where mirrors are placed! The way the mirrors are used for the murders in this book is far from surprising, and also not really well-hinted, so it feels underwhelming. There is a neat twist regarding the theme of mirrors halfway through the book, but the implications it has for the murders feel a bit forced, and ultimately, I feel this is the book in this series that would've benefitted of more page real estate: the book has many ideas that could've been worked out in more detail, but this particular label releases light novels of a certain length (relatively short) and thus the reveal feels not as satisfying as it could've been, as I think more pages to set-up the twist more with more foreshadowing would have made it a bit more impressive.
Kagamiyakata no Satsujin is thus my least favorite of the Shizuka novels until now. It doesn't help the major trope it focuses on doesn't allow for that much original plays, but the murders themselves are also a bit disappointing, with some underdeveloped tricks and while there's one big twist halfway I do like as a concept, that too should have been given more build-up space for maximum effect. At the moment, there's one more volume, so I'll probably read that one too, but I might wait a bit, because this one was quite disappointing.
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